Last night whilst we were pondering the finer points of coq a vin on 'Top Chef,' a small but serious contingent of Greenpoint hipsters (they're just like Williamsburg hipsters but taller, slightly less preposterous and more rugged) were enjoying a drink-laden and secret show by Beirut, Zach Condon's Balkans-Brooklyn indie-folk-whatever band. But the hipsters had a dirty secret.
Last night Doree and camera-man Nikola Tamindzic headed to deep Greenpoint for a party celebrating the opening of the Manhattan 55DSL store. (See how that works now?) 55DSL is Diesel's younger, cheaper line, and so they got a big yellow schoolbus to ferry people from the store over the water to Studio B, where they could revel in sharing the evening with hundreds of their closest friends who looked exactly like them and listen to the British band Klaxons do their dance-music thing. Nobody danced. They just stood around looking cool. Then they went back to Manhattan, where we hear that the after-party at Hiro Ballroom was "okay." The kids are so verbal.
Well, look at that! 'Vice' is doing a public service announcement about all the nasty-ass crap that's in the air and soil in Greenpoint and Williamsburg. Not that that's news, exactly, but we do like their implication that anyone buying one of those lovely million-dollar lofts springing up in the neighborhood is just asking for a great big case of cancer. They've got the obligatory quote from the hardened longtime Greenpoint resident, who tells the camera, "If I had that type of money I would be so out of here it wouldn't even be funny." Of course, they can't resist introducing the whole thing with a quickie anthropo-cultural tour of the area: "If you've been kicked out of art school anywhere in America in the past three years you're more than likely tending bar somewhere in the neighborhood." Or pretending to, at least.
An article about how Marisa Meltzer and Kara Jesella came to write their almost certainly awesome book How Sassy Changed My Life is over at Mediabistro, and though it's not available to the common folk due to their AvantGuild paywall, Ron Hogan of Galleycat gives a sense of its contents: "As Meltzer describes the process, 'It's one of those things where you can't believe your job is to sit and drink tea in Green Point and discuss Kim Gordon and the 90s, and her incredible importance.' Hell, I'm practically an expert at all that, except the Green Point part; clearly my problem is that I've been giving it away... " Disturbing as the thought of Ron Hogan "giving it away" is, it's not the most disturbing thing about that sentence. Green Point? Is this some nefarious Greenpoint rebranding that's underfoot? It's enough to make someone want to move to Gowanus. Er, Red Hook. Redhook?
New Yorker editor David Remnick told the Daily News that the joke in this recent cartoon is that 'Zbigniew' is difficult to pronounce. But residents of Brooklyn's 'little Warsaw' beg to differ. "The people from different nations, they drink, they get drugs; so why did they make the joke about Polish people?" asked Greenpoint music store owner Anna Doda. The New Yorker's form letter response says that "the tacit assumption ... is that the child is not of Polish origin." Oh really? When contacted for comment, the group of red-faced bums who sit in a pile of their own filth on the corner of Greenpoint and Manhattan Avenues all the time getting into drunken fights, singing, and occasionally crying, were like, "Bleaarrrrrghhhhh!" So... yes? Wait—no?
Wonder how our fave Greenpoint gentrifier, Haverford alum David Langlieb, feels about those damn Polacks' latest efforts to rain on his gentrification parade. At a meeting last week about concerts in McCarren Pool, neighborhood activists, some of whom weren't even Polish, ganged up on a Parks Department representative over last year's indie-rock-heavy lineup, "a problem he hoped would be solved through outreach to Colombian pop and Polish music promoters." But some activists were not to be mollified:
